Thanks @ChanaMessinger I appreciate this comment, and think that your kind of tone here is healthier than the original announcement. Your well written one sentence captures many of the important issues well.
”It could definitely be a mistake even within this framework (by causing 80k to not appeal parts of its potential audience) or empirically (on size of AI risk, or sizes of other problems) or long term (because of the damage it does to the EA community or intellectual lifeblood / eating the seed corn).”
FWIW I think a clear mistake is the poor communication here. That the most obvious and serious potential community impacts have been missed and the tone is poor. If this had been presented in a way that it looked like the most serious potential downsides were considered, I would both feel better about it and be more confident that 80k has done a deep SWAT analysis here rather than the really basic framing of the post which is more like...
“AI risk is really bad and urgent let’s go all in”
This makes the decision seem not only insensitive but also poorly thought through which in sure is not the case. I imagine the chief concerns of the commenters were discussed at the highest level.
I’m assuming there are comms people at 80k and it surprises me that this would slip through like this.
Thanks for the feedback here. I mostly want to just echo Niel’s reply, which basically says what I would have wanted to. But I also want to add for transparency/accountability’s sake that I reviewed this post before we published it with the aim of helping it communicate the shift well – I focused mostly on helping it communicate clearly and succinctly, which I do think is really important, but I think your feedback makes sense, and I wish that I’d also done more to help it demonstrate the thought we’ve put into the tradeoffs involved and awareness of the costs. For what it’s worth, & we don’t have dedicated comms staff at 80k—helping with comms is currently part of my role, which is to lead our web programme.
Thanks @ChanaMessinger I appreciate this comment, and think that your kind of tone here is healthier than the original announcement. Your well written one sentence captures many of the important issues well.
”It could definitely be a mistake even within this framework (by causing 80k to not appeal parts of its potential audience) or empirically (on size of AI risk, or sizes of other problems) or long term (because of the damage it does to the EA community or intellectual lifeblood / eating the seed corn).”
FWIW I think a clear mistake is the poor communication here. That the most obvious and serious potential community impacts have been missed and the tone is poor. If this had been presented in a way that it looked like the most serious potential downsides were considered, I would both feel better about it and be more confident that 80k has done a deep SWAT analysis here rather than the really basic framing of the post which is more like...
“AI risk is really bad and urgent let’s go all in”
This makes the decision seem not only insensitive but also poorly thought through which in sure is not the case. I imagine the chief concerns of the commenters were discussed at the highest level.
I’m assuming there are comms people at 80k and it surprises me that this would slip through like this.
Thanks for the feedback here. I mostly want to just echo Niel’s reply, which basically says what I would have wanted to. But I also want to add for transparency/accountability’s sake that I reviewed this post before we published it with the aim of helping it communicate the shift well – I focused mostly on helping it communicate clearly and succinctly, which I do think is really important, but I think your feedback makes sense, and I wish that I’d also done more to help it demonstrate the thought we’ve put into the tradeoffs involved and awareness of the costs. For what it’s worth, & we don’t have dedicated comms staff at 80k—helping with comms is currently part of my role, which is to lead our web programme.